I'm always drawn to the oldest part of any cemetery, where the stones are simple and the inscriptions obliterated by weather decades ago. Here's where you meet brave soldiers who fought in the Civil War, see entire families in their own private graveyard, and the final resting places of infants and toddlers, with stones so small they're like Popsicle sticks jammed into the ground.

Smith Cemetery in Penfield is a good example of one of these beautiful, old cemeteries. Originally established in the early 1800s as the Smith family burial ground, it stands high on a hill on Gloria Drive, exposed to punishing westerly winds and storms. The headstones there have really taken a beating. Many of them are already unreadable, especially those that are almost 200 years old.

The town wisely decided that something should be done before the cemetery's history was lost to the elements. What was needed was an accurate accounting of what's up there and who's buried there.

I learned about the Smith Cemetery preservation efforts from Kathy Kanauer, coordinator of the Local History Room at the Penfield Public Library. She told me that although some records from the very early days still exist, they're far from complete. Back then, "I don't think their record-keeping was great," she said. More recent efforts to map the cemetery have been spotty and contradictory. So basically, Kanauer said, "We're trying to make sense of this cemetery."

For his Eagle Scout project, Thomas was charged with the task of compiling an up-to-date map of the headstones in Smith Cemetery, a project completed in conjunction with the Penfield Trails Committee.

It didn't take Thomas very long to realize he'd taken on a pretty big project. "I started last November with surveying the project, which was the part that took the longest," he said. "The problem was the weather; it was often cold and snowing and raining."

But he persevered, and over the next five months, Thomas spent countless hours weaving through the graveyard, gathering information from every stone while his father took a photo of each one. By March he had transferred his findings to a true-scale map of the cemetery, including each gravestone's location, its condition and the name inscribed on it, if it was still legible. By his estimate, Thomas logged about 1,000 gravesites.

It was tedious work. But thanks to Thomas' efforts, a small corner of Penfield history is now better preserved. More importantly, the Bauerschmidts, the Lairds, the McGowans, the Smiths (of course), and all the other families who rest there will be remembered for many years to come.